University of Alberta photo project looks to Examiner readers for submissions for the Vertical Suburbia photo project

If you have a camera or a smartphone handy, a group at the University of Alberta is wants you to start looking at your world in a new way.

Vertical Suburbia, a crowdsourcing photo project, is seeking snapshots of suburban life, with a vertical twist.

“When you’re just walking down the street, ordinarily you’re just looking straight ahead, so you don’t run into something,” explains Vertical Suburbia collaborator and U of A Bachelor of Arts student Erika Luckert.

“But if you take that chance to look up and see that there’s an old pair of jeans hanging from that tree, or look down and see what someone left by the side of the road, then maybe you’re going to crash into the next light pole, but you can also find something a little more interesting.”

Vertical Suburbia was created two years ago by U of A assistant French professor Daniel Laforest, as part of the broader Edmonton Pipelines project.

Community members are asked to send in photos of suburban scenes accompanied by 140-word narratives.

The photos will be displayed online, some will appear in the Edmonton Examiner and Edmonton Sun, and if all goes as planned, many will eventually be part of a coffee-table book.

Laforest was playing with Google Street View when the idea first struck him.

“I thought, Google Street View enables us to stay in our home and explore neighbourhoods. What happens when we do it physically, for real?” Laforest says.

Part of the idea behind the project is to move past the idea that stories need to come from major events, and focus on every day things that populate the lives of Edmontonians living in the suburbs.

“We want to try to get a different take on what it feels like to live in the suburbs, and try to see if you can get a sense of a city’s identity by looking at its periphery, instead of looking at its monuments,” Laforest continues.

“If you try to tap into this well of experience, this well of memories, this well of ordinary life in the best sense of the term, what are you going to get?”

In a deeper sense, Laforest says the project aims to connect spaces that are at heart, and by essence, privatized.

He hopes the photos and accompanying 140-word submissions — which can be a true story or an imagination sparked by the image, rather than a caption — will uncover anomalies in suburban life and lead to subversion through creation.

“The suburbs are based on private spaces. There’s fences to divide the properties and it’s really regulated. Trespassing is almost a suburban notion,” Laforest says. “So how do you connect the individual lives in the suburbs? And this is where the imagination kicks in.”

The Vertical Suburbia team also includes collaborators Anna Sajecki and Joyce Yu.